The Supreme Court of India deals with a variety of matters ranging from the death penalty to promotion in services. Public Interest Litigation (PIL) constitutes a small proportion of the cases. But for about three decades, the judiciary didn't recognise the inability of economically marginalised people to approach the Supreme Court and high courts for the violation of the fundamental rights to life, liberty and equality. As the principle of locus standi was strictly followed, only those whose fundamental rights were violated were entitled to approach the courts for redressal. The relaxation of this principle and permitting third party actors to approach the courts on behalf of the poor and exploited in the public interest constitute the beginnings of PIL. In The Shifting Scales of Justice, editors Mayur Suresh and Siddharth Narrain seek to examine the operation of the Supreme Court as India charted a neoliberal path, a period the authors identify as the 'Judicial Nineties'. However, the book engages almost exclusively with PIL.
The introduction, along with most of the contributions in the book, are premised on the generally accepted framework of the post-Emergency period – late 1970s and 1980s – as the glorious era of PIL,with the Supreme Court working towards the amelioration of the conditions of the poor, downtrodden and exploited. In contrast, the Judicial Nineties is flamboyantly described by Aditya Nigam as when "the judiciary, in particular has thrown its full weight behind the corporate-capitalism-driven agenda of spatio-temporal transformation of India." With the publication of this book it is perhaps the right time to reflect on whether this post-Emergency phase of the Court has acquired a romanticised hue for activists and scholars, a tendency noted by Professor Upendra Baxi: "the judiciary [of the post-Emergency period] has become the prime instrumentality of re-democratising the processes of governance and practice of politics."